SmokeJohn Rybicki

My arms around your neck in our huddle, no need to
kneel in the mud to finger sparrow patterns for our flight across that
field, where other boys pace and wait for us to bull up to the line
and hike the ball. You and I notice that white breath pouring from our
mouths--we're boys for Christ's sake, so why this urge to be fisherman,
to gather our nets across our breath before it washes away? We smack
hands and release, bull down at the line where you yank up from between
my legs this fish, and you hurl it across the sky swimming from your
basket to my basket while my sneakers kick back mud drops and friction,
where that fish wiggles down into my arms and blows my body apart: my
giant rolling to his feet in the end zone, and your breath pours out
and my breath pours out on the other end of the field, and that breath
makes a rope of light between us.

John Rybicki's main gig,
his missionary work, is teaching creative writing to inner-city
children in Detroit. He tours the land teaching students at various
colleges and schools about the holiness of a sentence. Every day
he falls in love with stuff like the slightest trembling of a
leaf. His wife is his sun and moon and more. And when he isn't
teaching, or hammering away at the page, he likes to roll around
in the dirt doing carpentry.

His poems and stories have appeared
in the North American Review, Bomb, Field,
Ohio Review, The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly,
as well as in numerous anthologies. His first book of poems, Traveling
at High Speeds, is out on New Issues Poetry Press. And he
has a chapbook, Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider, forthcoming
on March Street Press. His second book of poems is Fire Psalm.